Her face softened with memory.
“It was a dramatic introduction. But something wonderful happened when I broke the mind-harvesters’ ships, when I took their weapons and made them mine: the people of Pasquarai were not afraid. They filled their songs with tales of robots in revolt, of evil machines, but they had songs of heroes, too. And when they looked at me, they judged me one of them, in most ways that mattered.” The Cloud warped as she spoke, shaping great spidery ships astride the stars, then Zanj, then the jungles of Pasquarai, but every time the purple tightened to an image it blew to chaos again—as if Zanj recoiled from the memory. “I led a small band, and we built a ship with our own tools and what we learned of the mind-harvesters’ science, and struck out to sea. We saw wonders. We met horrors, and each time I bested them and grew stronger. We brought back treasure from broken worlds: an end to hunger, an end to death. The people looked to me as their protector, their savior. But as we traveled, I learned the night was full of mouths. I first learned of the Empress when I saw the destruction she left in her wake. I knew I couldn’t keep my home safe forever. So I looked for weapons, and allies, and everything that happened after … happened.”
This time, Zanj did not stop the shaping of the Cloud. Billowing burning cumulus ships, bodies scattered like chaff, rainbows of frozen blood and coolant spray, the gaping mouths of Bleed, and at the heart of the chaos, the Empress herself, one hand around Zanj’s throat, the other pressed, burning, to her face. Zanj regarded the tableau, and what she thought she did not say.
At first Viv found it strange. Why shrink from memories of friendship, of grace and victory, and linger on what went wrong?
She listened to the silence and the cold wind, and felt Zanj’s hand warm beside hers. Of course it was easier to remember the pain. That was the end of the story, as Zanj saw it, the end that lurked behind every earlier moment’s joy. As she remembered each triumph, she thought, yes, that’s nice, but why not cut to the chase? The duke’s eyes put out, the princess hanged, the king dead, the country overrun with wolves. What’s a love story compared with that, or the capering of a fool?
“When I believed they were dead, or stuck in the Empress’s belly, I thought, okay, all I have to do is kill her. No matter how slim my chances of success—she has to end. I tried. But now I have to wade through whatever’s become of them. She is cruel, you know. I’ve seen her make people into garments. She’s warmed her hands off corpse fires. You have a twisted mind.”
Viv didn’t argue that.
“I don’t want to see what she did to them. But here we are.”
“You could stay on the ship.” When Zanj turned to her, one eyebrow raised, she set a hand between them, predefensive. “Just sit this one out. Let us handle it. You don’t have to suffer.”
“You’re horrible at reassuring people.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” she said. “Or so I hear.”
“I’m by your side, in whatever monstrous bad plan you come up with. Because I can keep you safe. Because you’re my friend. And because the others like you too much to call you on your bullshit.” Her shoulders rose and fell. She fell back against the ship’s skin, and took Viv with her, and the Cloud roiled above them, shaping to dreams. “After all these years, I finally let that jade monster get to me.”
Viv found her hand, and held it. Demons formed above them in the Cloud, but she breathed deep and stilled her mind and let them go. A cool breeze slid across her. Zanj’s fingers tightened around her own. “Whatever it is,” she said, “we’ll face it together.” For a second, at least, she sounded brave.
But late that night, when she told Xiara the story in whispers, in bed, in the warmth of her, Viv confessed: “I’m scared, too.”
* * *
THEY NEARED THE wall. Zanj introduced Xiara to the Star, in case she fell out of action somehow; Hong reviewed its systems, in hopes he could guide Gray to fix whatever might break on the journey—though if anything went seriously wrong, they’d be too dead for repairs. Viv gathered them for short meetings in the hold: what do we need, what can we build, how can we get there. For every contingency they addressed, she knew they were missing two. But planning occupied the mind.
A change in the Star’s cello pitch, and a slight seasick feeling, announced their return to normal space. A rising chorus of Russian basses heralded the nearing wall. The crew joined Zanj in the cockpit, all blackness and curves and clean lines, to watch: the fractal-cracked surface stretched for light-years to all sides, its curve so slight as to be invisible. Here and there planetoid faces stared out into the dark.
“Now we learn just how much we trust your Archivist,” Zanj said.
Hong leaned forward against the control panel. “She is the best of the ’faith, and this decryption is the work of our finest scholars and saints.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Zanj reached to turn off a glowing red subsystem Hong had activated with a careless elbow.
The chorus swelled. Viv reviewed the plan again. “I’ll open a path into the wall. After that, we slip to Pasquarai, take the linchpin down fast, and—”
“Hush,” Zanj said. “You’re distracting me.”
They drew closer: the wall’s cracks were deeper than oceans, its peaks taller than solar flares. It had no surface—just knives going in, and in, and in. They approached, until its jagged points settled against the Star.
“Okay,” Zanj said. “Your turn.”
Viv reached for the viewscreen. It flowed around her touch, parted—and she stroked the rough surface of the wall. She drew her hand back before she realized the touch hurt; her finger was wet with blood. The viewscreen rippled shut and the wall rippled, too, its sharp points and waves melting, revolving, a whirlpool the size of a solar system drawing them in, and in, and down.
The cello notes swelled and deepened. The Star lurched forward, buffeted, tumbled down an endless pit whose walls blushed Cloud purple, and Viv could no longer tell what sort of space surrounded them. Somewhere, alarms rang. Somewhere, Hong and Gray were shouting. Somewhere, Zanj growled, and Xiara seized the controls.
And they slipped through. Out. Into the world, or something like it.
Damage report: systems red, the Star screaming, but they were alive, and they would heal. Gray was famished, Hong bruised from a fall; Xiara cursed the rudeness of Zanj’s ship. “I’m never touching that thing again!” Zanj growled.
Only Viv was staring out the window.
“Guys,” she said. “Look.”
Below, in the endless night of the wall, an enormous station orbited a burning spark of star. Not an Imperial station, either. Rings of rock spun instead of crystal, green and growing, run with rivers, mountain peaks gleaming ice. Even calling it a station seemed wrong. This was a world. Someone had skinned a planet, turned it inside out, and made an orrery in the black.
Each ring cast bands of shadow on another’s surface as it turned, and those artificial nights gleamed with cities, hearth fires, welcome fires, against the dark. Other rings of metal and crystal revolved within the rings of world, and ships darted between them all.
Viv had seen so many dead planets since she woke in High Carcereal, so many ruins and engines of war. This was a world alive.
“I know those rivers,” Zanj said. “Those seas.” Waterfalls joined some rings, impossibly, oceans running horizontal to merge with other oceans across empty space. “Those mountains. Those cities. What did she do?” She stabbed the console, and broadcasts crackled onto the speakers. Music, drum and electric zither bass; news updates; a joke Viv didn’t understand, but the audience laughed. The babble of a culture. And nowhere any trace of screams. Zanj blinked up at her, at all of them. She looked like she was falling. “They’re alive.”
Before Viv could answer her, the broadcasts all cut out at once, in a crackle of static, replaced by a single voice with a flat affect Viv realized she had not heard since home: the boredom of a functioning bureaucrat. “Unidentified craft, pow
er down your weapons and state your identity and intention.”
Zanj was still staring, in no condition to reply. Hell. “Um. This is Captain Viv of the Rising Star.” Zanj glared at her. She shrugged. “We’ve suffered damage coming through the wall. We come in peace. We’d, ah, we’d like to land? And look around?”
“Feeding you coordinates, Rising Star. Please stand by for air traffic control. Welcome to Pasquarai Station, in the name of Queen Zanj.”
61
PASQUARAI STATION: SKIES shaded alien blue, cliffs terraced green and trailing vines, swift rivers, wheeling birds with wingspans meters broad, all seen through interlocking leaves of skyscraper-tall trees, their branches woven to support the cities of Zanj’s leaping, climbing people. The Star settled onto a web of steel-firm vines strung between those branches, and its crew descended, Viv gingerly, Gray yawning, Xiara’s eyes wide wonderment, Hong watchful, Zanj glaring as if she’d come down on the bad side of a mean-spirited joke.
“This can’t be real,” she said as she rolled the Star back into a staff.
Gray bit off a piece of the steel-taut vines, chewed experimentally, said, mouth full, “Tastes real to me.”
“It’s a trap. And don’t eat our landing pad.”
Gray shrugged, and swallowed.
Hong knelt where the ship had been, drew a tightly coiled device from within his robe, and unfolded it into a three-dimensional mandala of diamond gears that stuck in air, turned, and glowed, and wavered invisible. “There. Even if something happens to us, the ’fleet can follow the beacon in. I hope.”
“It’s beautiful.” Xiara turned, arms wide, eyes up and bright, and the sparksun’s light through the leaves gilded her with green.
“Of course it’s beautiful,” Zanj snapped. “I told you it was beautiful. But this is wrong. The trees are right, and the spaceport, but this place used to be a planet.”
“Did you build that?” Viv pointed to an enormous spire—hard to judge its immensity without a proper gauge for distance, but she’d bet it was ten miles high, ringed with ships and drones and flying machines and a sculpted crystal mountain with, at its summit, hand to brow, Star in grip, glaring at the horizon, a colossal Zanj. Unscarred, uncrowned.
Zanj, scarred, crowned, glared suspicion at the world in general, and her diamond double in specific. “Does that look like something I’d build?”
No one answered. Viv, specifically, avoided her gaze.
Leaves rustled, and a shape flitted toward them from branch to branch above, moving with tail and all four limbs. It sprang from the canopy at last, somersaulting, falling as if gravity were a rude suggestion—a line of dark fur and tan cloth.
They split to a defensive formation: Hong drew his clubs, and the quicksilver veins on his skin pulsed; Gray gained a meter’s height, his fingers lengthened into claws, his teeth coarsened to spades. Wheels turned in Xiara’s eyes. Viv didn’t even look at Zanj; she could too vividly imagine the bone-deep pop and, after it, bloodshed and ruin—before they understood what they’d found. “Stop,” she said, hands out, “stand down, dammit,” and marched forward, unarmed as ever, to meet the blur that landed now, with a fall-breaking tumble any gymnast would envy. It came to its feet: a young manalogue in a pressed tan coverall, brown fur streaked with gold, long tail coiled behind him, pencil behind one ear, clipboard in hand, watching Viv and her companions with fascination undimmed by her companions’ threat of violence. “Wonderful!”
“That’s one word for it,” Viv said, and put out her hand. “Mind telling us where we’ve landed?”
He drew himself up to his full hunch, cocked his head to one side, and stroked his brow with the knuckles of his left fist. In that motion he looked for all the world like Zanj. “This is most irregular,” he said. “Please understand: you are welcome here, and we cast no aspersions on your intent, as guests of Pasquarai Station. But for some centuries, we have received traffic solely from the other rings, not counting the Empress’s raids, of course. Indeed, we thought any outsider’s approach to our dear homeland impossible. As such we lack, shall we say, proper procedures. It is quite embarrassing. The Port Authority have sent a supervisor to address the specifics of your case, but in the meantime I’m afraid to confess I don’t know how to complete the arrival forms.” He licked the pencil tip, made a few quick notes. “Captain … Viv, is it?”
A lie wasn’t the best way to start a relationship, but both silence and the truth posed their own set of problems. “You haven’t heard of me?”
Those big gold eyes blinked once. “Most abject apologies, but no.”
She put on a bluff she’d heard any number of young men use to shame people who didn’t recognize the name of their latest venture. “The Rising Star’s the fastest blockade runner in the galaxy. We’ve slid through the gullets of black holes; we’ve escaped from collapsed Cloud, and out of the mouth of the Bleed.” She stopped herself from adding and we made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs. “Charting a course through the Citadel wall is all in a day’s work for us.” The flunky watched her so eagerly Viv almost felt bad—was he drinking it up, or giving her more rope to hang herself? “We’ve come to return your—” She stopped herself from saying queen. “—countrywoman.” And she stepped aside, indicating …
Not Zanj. Not anymore. She had changed her face, grown paler, her hair grayed, her body longer, leaner. Only the scar and the crown remained. Zanj bowed, saying nothing, looking confused save for the momentary flick of her eyes to Viv: Well?
“We found her floating in space,” Viv offered, smooth, “amid ruined worlds beyond the Tannheuser Gate, remembering nothing save her name. She traveled with us, and fought by our side. We tried to find out where she was from: a scrap here, a whisper there, led us to the wall. To you.”
The flunky placed his pencil back behind his ear, and smoothed fur from his forehead again. His voice trembled with awe. “Lady, I seem to know you.”
“And yet I do not know myself.” Zanj chose her words like an old woman crossing ice might choose her steps—Viv almost believed she was really so lost and alone. “I think I was called Seng.”
“I am First Orderly Yish.” He approached her slowly, wondering, and reached out to lay a hand against her temple, as if she were something holy. Before he touched her, he remembered duty, propriety, his clipboard. He hopped back, gathered himself into an approximation of officialdom, and bowed. “We thought all who lived beyond the wall were lost.”
“You were wrong,” Zanj replied. “But I do not know where I am, and I do not know this place.”
“Of course,” Yish said, overcome by wonder: “Of course. I did not mean—Lady, I apologize for assuming you knew what transpired in your absence. Come. Come all of you. You are Pasquarai’s first visitors in generations, and you should know our story.”
He darted ahead of them, climbing branches, leaping from limb to limb, always talking, while they labored below on walkways and bridges of woven vines that must have been built for those too hurt, too old, too young, to climb. The trees descended beneath, limb after limb, far as Viv could see, until their trunks converged in shadow, and they rose overhead, attenuating to verdant green shot through with light. Doors in tree bark opened and closed to admit more swinging, chattering dockhands; gold and silver vehicles stitched rainbow wakes through the sky. Birds sang, not each to each but in chorus, their voices melded with deeper whistles Viv had taken, at first, for wind, for the creaking of boughs. All worked together, reinforced itself, nature’s sounds welded to song.
“We are the children of Queen Zanj, who saved us three times. We owe her all we have: she joined the independent gaggle of Pasquarai into a people, she taught us to defend ourselves, and she defeated Death on our behalf.” Viv wasn’t the only one among their party who looked at Zanj with questions after that, but Zanj only answered with a shrug. “Then she set out to fight one still greater enemy: the Empress who eats worlds. She harried her. She raised up a great fleet and strove to cast her down wi
th all her immense might and all her still greater cunning.” So far Zanj nodded along. They climbed a rising stair around the trunk toward a massive branch from which hung an observation dome, apparently carved from a single piece of amber. “This war came to a head three thousand years ago: all forces on both sides arrayed, a trap set for the Empress, her defeat certain, if her defeat was possible at all. But the Empress did not fall in that battle. The tides turned against us, but our Queen could not abandon her people—so when the Empress caught her, Her Majesty left a shell in the Empress’s grip, a copy, a skin, and fled the wreck of battle, and came home.”
Zanj stopped, stared. “That’s not possible.”
Caught up in the story, Yish did not seem to notice his audience’s reaction. “For you or I, perhaps, but not impossible for Zanj. Our Queen could not defeat the Empress, but she could protect us nonetheless. She had uncovered a weakness in the Empress’s Citadel, a nexus in the lines of force that power its wall. If Queen Zanj moved our world into the wall itself, and wrapped us around that nexus, the Empress’s defense would become our own. The Bleed could not find us here, and the Empress could not strike us with her full might, lest we destroy her wall and expose her to the Bleed. So Queen Zanj, in infinite cunning, brought us here, and kept us safe these three thousand years, during which she has ruled peacefully and well. From time to time the Empress sends her fleet against us, but she cannot deploy her fullest strength within the wall without exposing herself to the Bleed, and again and again Queen Zanj and our own ships have prevailed.” His voice swelled with bureaucratic pride. “I myself have coordinated the launch of our fighter waves. It is a small service to Pasquarai, but all service is joy.”
Zanj’s face had flushed a strangled shade of purple. “Leading you all into retreat? Holding a siege against the Empress? Hiding in the wall? That doesn’t sound like—like a Queen.”
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